Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Belloc Lowndes
-
Standard Name: Lowndes, Marie Belloc
Birth Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Belloc
Nickname: Mary
Married Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Lowndes
Indexed Name: Mrs Belloc Lowndes
Pseudonym: Philip Curtin
Pseudonym: Elizabeth Rayner
During a career that spanned nearly fifty years from 1889, MBL
published journalism, biography, a guidebook, history for children, novels (mostly romances or thrillers), a book about actual crimes, and four late volumes of autobiography. Her books of crime and detection were her most successful. Her list of titles numbers more than seventy.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, a Roman Catholic, observed in late 1945 that EMD
's early anti-Catholic suffered from a failure of realism, being filled with fantastic imaginary figures of the old Catholic world.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
Lowndes, Diaries 267
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
Sooner or Later received (perhaps excessively) high praise from a number of VH
's contemporaries. Marie Belloc Lowndes
(daughter of Bessie Rayner Parkes
) wrote in The Merry Wives of Westminster, 1946, that it...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
Critically, MAW
has not fared well since her death, despite her immense popularity in her lifetime and the seriousness with which her contemporaries read her. She was quickly cast as more Victorian than Edwardian...
Literary responses
Patricia Wentworth
The Gazette awarded PW
a prize of 250 guineas for her work.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
77
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, remarked that the Dickens
of A Tale of Two Cities had...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who knew VL
fairly well, felt out of sympathy with her frightening erudition and off-putting snobbery—but she was indignant at Anatole France
's caricature of Lee in Le lys rouge.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Where Love and Friendship Dwelt. Macmillan.
177
Literary responses
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
In one of the many tributes published at the time of her death in 1934, friend and writer Marie Belloc Lowndes
(daughter of feminist Bessie Rayner Parkes
) said that CADSwrote certain remarkable novels...
Literary responses
Rebecca West
Marie Belloc Lowndes
considered this one of the best critical books in the language.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
Literary responses
Rhoda Broughton
In a lamentable
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
217
article on the death of Virginia Woolf
, Hugh Walpole
accused literary ladies of acting like priestesses engaged in throwing fragrant incense on their own altars. The first name he mentions...
Occupation
Lady Cynthia Asquith
She needed the money, since she and her husband (still in France) both had debts. She worked three or four days a week, whatever hours suited her (she was free, for instance, to take school...
Occupation
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
At about this time she painted her finest water-colour, a large painting of the plain of Blidah in Algiers, showing honey-coloured sand, sparsely covered with grey olive trees, blue cacti, and alfa [sic]...
Occupation
Elizabeth De la Pasture
Marie Belloc Lowndes
(who calls her Lady Clifford) writes that EDP
spoke interestingly, in October 1925, about her experiences visiting public institutions in Ceylon. The local authorities arranged to omit the lunatic asylums...
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
96
Sinclair, however, could not approve the increasingly...
politics
Sarah Grand
In an interview in 1896, SG
made clear her belief in the need for female suffrage: We shall do no good until we get the Franchise, for however well-intentioned men may be, they cannot understand...
Publishing
Olivia Manning
She regarded this book as an exercise in learning how to sustain a long narrative.
English, Isobel, and Olivia Manning. “Introduction”. The Wind Changes, Virago, p. v - xvi.
ix
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who was supportive and generous with praise of this book, also told OM
that her...
